In corporate training consulting, it’s crucial to keep your course offer up to date to attract new clients and retain existing ones. According to Gamelearn’s Serious Games, Serious Impact report, based on the answers of more than 1000 HR professionals, the majority of surveyed consultants seek to differentiate themselves from the competition when planning their training catalog. This is followed by other purposes, as fundamental to their business as satisfying their existing clients or innovating with new ways to generate income.
Attracting new client companies that need help meeting their internal development goals can be a challenge. Here are five recommendations that might inspire you:
1. Strengthen your digital offer
In the context of the pandemic we’ve been experiencing since the beginning of 2020, most companies have diverted their HR departments’ budgets towards the digital environment.
If you’re a training consultant for companies, it seems inevitable that you’d include e-learning among your services if you want to successfully respond to the needs of your clients. But online training can vary a lot, depending on the technology you use and the resources you include.
We know how little motivation some online courses generate in students when they’re delivered in boring formats and communication is basically unidirectional. In this sense, gamified e-learning, which allows interaction, is the key.
2. Invest in an authoring tool for online courses
In order to develop a digital product, it’s essential to use the appropriate technology. Finding the right authoring tool for the type of courses you want to build is key.
Said software will allow you to generate training that’s easily adaptable to different learning objectives in a highly scalable way, making the investment in it profitable. The learning curve for these tools can be lower in some cases than in others, so it’s important to take this into account before purchasing one.
3. Partner with experts
Depending on the complexity of your chosen authoring tool, it may be advisable to hire or partner with a specialized instructional designer. This expert can build your courses based on the content you want to integrate and your objectives for each module or set.
In terms of the educational content, it may also be worthwhile to resort to experts in specific topics that your clients request and that you want to include in your catalog, be it digital, hybrid, or face-to-face. This brings us to our fourth recommendation.
4. Identify the topics that your target clients demand the most
Although it may not seem so, actively listening to your clients to detect what they expect from corporate training requires a special effort. They may not talk about their needs explicitly, so it’s important to ask the right questions and apply your consulting expertise to make sure you get the information you want.
In this sense, it’s essential to identify what topics might interest them, even if they’re not aware of them. To make this easier, it’s a good idea to follow the trends in the corporate training market closely, as well as the possible legislative changes that may affect your client companies and the mandatory training they must offer to their staff.
5. Analyze the results of your courses
All products, including courses, have their own lifecycle. So it’s important to analyze if the objectives set out at the launch of a course have been fulfilled. With such an analysis, you can prolong that cycle as much as possible, make necessary changes in a timely manner, or even stop maintenance on a course if the data indicates that’s the best option.
In this respect, the technology of the platform used to create and/or manage your online training can determine if getting the necessary metrics will be simple or not. Keep this in mind when planning your online training offer to grow your catalog effectively.
